On Teaching "French"

Abstract

When I was asked to do honor to the memory of Sonia Marks by speaking to you this evening, I was immensely pleased and accepted with alacrity. But I was also somewhat daunted. Sonia was a person who, whatever she did, got things right. In particular, in her profession as a teacher of French language, she was at immense pains to work successfully with her students, both in and out of class. She was fully abreast of the literature on second language acquisition, she planned her classroom strategies meticulously, she went out of her way to know her students individually, she brought flair and imagination, but also thoughtfulness and above all human warmth, to what she did. How does one give a lecture that honors someone like that? I have no technical knowledge of Sonia's professional field and indeed for many years now I've had little or no practical experience of language either. I have, though, for the last thirty-five years-divided almost equally between experience in various Australian universities before 1975, and since then at a large university in the American Midwest--continuously taught something that kept changing but was always called French. What does that mean? I would have liked to talk with Sonia about that question, about what it has meant for me personally, but more generally about what teaching 'French' has meant over that period in the two countries in which I have had experience, and about what it might mean in the future. She would have helped me to figure it out; that was one of the things she liked to do, I think, and certainly she did it superbly well. I offer my thoughts, then, to you, hoping that they will be of interest, but also as a kind of compensatory gesture, a symbolic substitute for the conversation I can't have-that none of us can now have-with Sonia. My perspective is that of a university teacher of French, for which I apologize to those of you more interested in secondary education--but I hope that the differences between the two fields aren't so great that my comments will seem entirely irrelevant. It is also the perspective of someone who is quite out of touch with the current state of affairs in language education in Australia, so